How to track outgoing Affiliate links with Google Analytics Event Tracking code

Want to track the clicks of outgoing links or calls to action on your site? A little snippet of Google event tracking javascript is all you need to capture, categorize and label the event in Google Analytics.

Example of Event Tracking Code: Tracking Outgoing Affiliate Links

I want to be able to easily view the performance of my non-Google Outgoing Affiliate links alongside my other revenue streams inside Google analytics. I could pull reports from Shopzilla or Amazon along with reports from Google Analytics and smash them together in Excel, but I don’t have to. I can pop event tracking code into the onclick attribute of my affiliate link anchor tags and create a quick Custom Report in Google Analytics to compare the activity of my affiliate program with other revenue sources.

A simple link might look like this:

<a class="shopzilla-affiliate" title="Balvenie 15 Year Scotch" href="http://some-url-with-tags-and-such/">Find the best prices Balvenie 15 Single Malt Scotch</a>

To track clicks on that link with event tracking I’d add:

onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Shopzilla Text Link', 'Click', 'Balvenie 15']);"

_trackEvent is the event tracking function to call

'Shopzilla Text Link' is the category of events

'Click' is the action taken

'Balvenie 15' is the label given to the specific event

When I’m done, I can find my event tracking data under content in Google Analytics then view by category or a specific label. In a future post, I’ll get into creating a custom report to view the performance alongside other revenue streams.

See Google’s event tracking help section here for general reference.

Facebook Ads: First Campaign Setup and Results

For the first seven months, I did zero paid marketing for Brown-Liquor.com, my scotch tasting blog. The blog was attracting about 200 unique visits per month for the first 7 months, with about 70% of those being new visitors. My goals where #1: more visits (to feed my ego) and #2: better retention (to maybe make some money). I dipped a toe into Facebook ads to get started on #1.

Why Facebook Ads were my first paid marketing

Simplicity and volume. The simple interface makes it easy to home in on your target demographic. Facebook has more than 500 million users and it knows a lot about its users: within 5 minutes you can set up your ad to display to exactly who you want.

And the interface shows you how many users fall within your demographic.

I set up a simple, three day, test Facebook campaign at the same time I set up an Adwords campaign. Facebook is highly targeted, but, theoretically, search marketing should be more effective because people are actively searching for (hopefully if you’ve done it right) what you’re offering. Adwords has a steeper learning curve, so I’ll report on those results separately. This Facebook Ads experience has yielded positive enough results that I will very likely run another, longer term Facebook campaign. Or three.

10 Minute Campaign Setup

1. Create Your Ad

• Go to http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/
• URL Destination for your Ad: this can be a Facebook page you already have setup, a Facebook app or an external URL. I used my blog URL with a couple of Google Analytics tags (the simple Google URL Builder helps) added to it to track results in there as well as in the Facebook reporting tool.
• Text: Give your ad a title (max 25 characters), and a body (max 135 characters) which tells the viewer why they might click and what they can expect. Gear the copy toward human readability because we’ll take care of keyword targeting in the next section.
• Image: Upload an image and check out the preview. There are a few more things you can do here, but I’ll get to those in a more comprehensive feature post.

2. Targeting the Right People

This is where it gets fun.

• The Basics: Start broad with region, age and sex.
• Likes & Interests: Then enter likes and interests (keywords/terms/phrases). Facebook will show suggestions taken from actual likes and interests on people’s pages. The terms you enter here will match with terms listed on Facebook profiles under Info as well as things users are fans of or groups they’ve joined. For example, I’ve Liked the Single Malt Scotch and the Scotch pages, so an ad targeted to those words would show up on my page.
• Connection Targeting: If I administer a facebook page, I can target those who Like my page and the connections of those who like my page. Since I don’t have many followers on my page, I left that part defaulted to All.
• Advanced Demographics: Target people on their birthdays, by their sexual preference, relationship status and language spoken. None of those matter much to me at the moment, so I left them defaulted to All.
• Education & Work: Select an education level if you’d like to target people who went to a specific school or who hold a specific degree. Enter a company name to target employees of specific companies. I left both of these at All.

3. Campaigns, Pricing and Scheduling

• Campaign and Budget: Name your campaign so you can remember which one it is. Give it a daily budget. For me, that was $4/day.
• Schedule: Give the campaign a start and end date or set it to run continuously until further notice.
• Pricing: Select CPC (pay per click) or CPM (pay per 1000 impression). I chose impressions because I wasn’t sure which would end up being cheaper. Incidentally, the suggested pay per click price was $1.50 and I ended up spending $.64/click choosing impressions. My next test campaign will be PPC and I’ll compare the results. Now that I have some results, my PPC bid will probably be closer to that $.64 than the $1.50.

And that’s it. Click place order, set up your credit card for payment and let it ride.

The Results

As of today, 4 days into the campaign:

• Impressions – 49,409
• Clicks – 21
• Click Through Rate – .043%
• Avg. CPC – $.64
• Avg. CPM – $.27
• Total Spent – $13.46

Bottom line, I spent $13.46 for 21 extra visits (according to Google Analytics, all were new). To put that in perspective, that is more than a 10% increase in visits over last month in 4 days. If I the results persist, I could potentially increase visits by nearly 80% over the course of 30 days. Of course, there will be a drop off in acquisition as the same people start seeing the ad over and over. Perhaps some of those people will see something they like and move over to the retention side of the fence, but that’s a whole other ballgame.

I’ll report back next month with an update and share strategies I come up with in the interim.

My actual results as of today are below:

What if we paid for groceries the way we pay for healthcare?

Bottom line, the problem stems from the people making the purchases in healthcare not being aware of or directly accountable for the cost. This American Life on NPR produced a couple of great shows on the topic of healthcare costs: More is Less and Someone Else’s Money.  I highly recommend listening to them for an easy to understand overview of health insurance. They used a great analogy to illustrate how little sense our current method of paying for healthcare really is: Groceries. If we paid for groceries in the way we pay for healthcare, we could easily see where the problem lies. Let’s say you’re an employer. Your employee pays a set amount to you per month for groceries and you pay for grocery insurance. The employee then goes to the grocery store when he or she needs to and fills a basket with what they think they need, maybe slaps down a few bucks as a copay, then goes home. Do you think that employee was clipping coupons or checking prices on what they were buying? Nope. Why would they? It’s all included in “the system”. The grocery store probably didn’t even put prices on the items because it would be pointless.

Let’s say also that your grocery insurer pays the bills and doesn’t let you see the prices, what was purchased, where or by whom. Nobody sees the prices. What do you think is going to happen to grocery costs with no one looking at the prices? You got it. They’re going through the roof. Grocery stores will stock the highest priced items and probably price them with a healthy margin because, who’s looking? Their responsibility is to their shareholders, and hefty margins make their shareholders happy. The insurance company might be a little perturbed and try to get prices down, but they’re going to price grocery insurance properly to keep their margins up as well. You, the employer, and your employee with whom you are sharing the cost of groceries are the only ones who can’t see the price and also the only ones who get hit with increases in grocery insurance rates that may rise at rate more than four times that of inflation, on the average.

This method of payment for goods and services plays havoc with basic principles of supply and demand. Insurance is not a healthy method for paying for goods and services.

Americans spend 1/3 more on healthcare than they need to according to the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare. The Atlas has studied Medicare spending in hospitals all over the nation and has found that the extra healthcare spending does not improve our health. I’m looking forward to digging further into the wealth of information the Atlas has gathered.